South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is battling to jumpstart Côte d’Ivoire’s stalled peace process, ended talks on Tuesday with President Laurent Gbabgo and Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaore without releasing any results.
Compaore, who is this month’s head of the rotating presidency of the African Union (AU) peace and security council, said they ”exchanged views on the situation in Ivory Coast”.
”We made an evaluation and we will continue to work in the coming days at the Ecowas and African Union level, to have proposals for a solution on the Ivory Coast crisis,” Compaore told reporters without further details at the end of the talks at Ouaga 2000 conference centre, south of the capital.
Mbeki had met Gbagbo on Monday in the Ivorian economic capital Abidjan in his bid to seek a new way out of the protracted political crisis.
The United Nations — the main sponsor and overseer of the faltering peace process — has admitted that an October 31 deadline for holding elections in Côte d’Ivoire would be missed for the second time in as many years due to ”serious roadblocks” in the process.
Gbagbo boycotted the talks between the main parties to the conflict last week at the UN headquarters in New York on grounds that the peace process had ”failed”.
No new dates were announced for polls at the end of last week’s talks, but the regional grouping Ecowas and the AU were tasked with coming up with a poll date to be submitted to the UN Security Council by October 17.
The 15-member Ecowas is due to meet early next month, followed by the AU meeting in Addis Ababa before the UN Security Council takes a decision on October 17.
The Ivorian leader last week said he was ”thinking of an alternative plan to be put to the African Union” and was ready to discuss it, but was no longer willing to negotiate with the country’s opposition.
Mbeki is walking a tightrope, having been rejected by the New Forces rebels who perceive him as biased towards Gbagbo, while Burkina Faso is seen to be closely aligned to the New Forces rebels.
Last December Mbeki appointed former regional central bank governor Charles Konan Banny as transitional prime minister to oversee the disarmament of rebel and pro-government factions to be followed by elections.
But the UN-brokered peace process has ground to a halt.
Youssouf Ouedraogo, Foreign Minister of Burkina Faso, last week at the UN General Assembly said ”the Ivorian crisis is at a turning point”.
Once a model of prosperity and stability in West Africa, the world’s top cocoa producer and former French colony has been split into a rebel-held north and a government-controlled south since a brief civil war that broke out in 2002 when rebels tried to topple Gbagbo. – Sapa-AFP